A Very British Coup

By Chris Mullin

Against the odds, former steel worker Harry Perkins has led the Labour party to a stunning victory. Now he's going to dismantle Britain's nuclear warheads, bring finance under public control and dismantle the media empires.

But the establishment isn't going down without a fight. As MI5 conspires with the city and press barons to bring Perkins down, he finds himself caught up in a no-holds-barred battle for survival.

Described as 'the political novel of the decade' when it was first published, A Very British Coup is as fresh and relevant now as it ever has been.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Sep 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781847652270

Chris Mullin

Chris Mullin was elected labour MP for Sunderland South in 1987. He chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee and was a minister in three departments. He is the author of the A View From the Foothills and Decline and Fall(Profile) and the novel A Very British Coup (Serpent's Tail)

Book preview

Introduction to the 2017 edition

On the very day of the recent general election, 8 June 2017, an article appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph warning that the election of Jeremy Corbyn would be ‘profoundly dangerous for the nation’. The article went on, ‘… in the past MI5 would actively have investigated him. He cannot be trusted with the fate of Britain.’

The author was Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6 and one of the men who got us into the Iraq catastrophe, an issue upon which Corbyn’s judgement proved superior to his. Until I read this I had thought that the days when the intelligence and security services interfered in domestic politics were long over. Now I am not so sure.

A Very British Coup was conceived nearly forty years ago in a political climate which, until recently at least, was very different to that which prevails today. In October 1980 I was on a train returning from the Labour party conference in Blackpool with Stuart Holland, who had recently been elected MP for Lambeth Vauxhall, and Tony Banks and Peter Hain who later became MPs. We were discussing how the Establishment would react to the election of a left-wing Labour government. In those far-off days Mrs Thatcher was in office, but had yet to consolidate her grip on power. Labour was high in the opinion polls and there was a real possibility that, come the election, the Labour Party would be led by Tony Benn. The right-wing press was working itself into a frenzy at the prospect. ‘No longer if, but when’ screamed a headline in one of the Harmsworth newspapers over a full-page picture of Mr Benn. To cap it all, the announcement that the Americans were planning to install cruise missiles in their British bases had given new life to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

‘A good subject for a novel’, remarked one of my companions, prompting Peter Hain to reveal that he and a friend were in the process of circulating to publishers an outline for exactly such a novel. Stuart Holland went one better. He revealed that, by the swimming pool in Greece that summer, he had tapped out the opening chapters of a novel on the same subject. In the event it was I who got there first, but it was a close shave. Years later Peter Hardiman Scott, a former chief political correspondent of the BBC, told me that when A Very British Coup was published he was two-thirds of the way through writing a novel based on a similar premise. His was so uncannily similar that, after consulting his publisher, he decided to abandon his effort. How lucky I was. It could have so easily been I who was pipped at the post.

A Very British Coup was published in the autumn of 1982 and attracted a mild flurry of interest. At the time I was working at the left-wing weekly, Tribune, and we sold the book through an advertisement in the back of the paper. The first order came from the American embassy and this was followed in due course with an invitation to lunch with the Minister, the most important official after the ambassador. The novel was helpfully denounced in the correspondence columns of The Times and as a result sales at the top people’s bookshop, Hatchards in Piccadilly, briefly exceeded those at the left-wing bookshop, Collets (since that time I have realised that, when it comes to selling books, a good, high-profile denunciation is worth half a dozen friendly reviews). The first hardback print sold quickly and a modest paperback print followed. Thereafter it might have died but for events conspiring to make it topical.

In August 1985 the Observer revealed that an MI5 official, Brigadier Ronnie Stoneham, was to be found in room 105 at Broadcasting House, stamping upturned Christmas trees on the personnel files of BBC employees he deemed ideologically unsound. Students of A Very British Coup will know that my head of MI5, Sir Peregrine Craddock, was also vetting BBC employees. What’s more, he had a spy on the general council of CND and in due course an MI5 defector revealed that there had indeed been such a spy. His name was Harry Newton. Finally in 1987 Peter Wright, a retired MI5 officer, caused a sensation with his claim that a group of MI5 officers, of whom he was one, had plotted to undermine the government of Harold Wilson. Suddenly the possibility that the British Establishment might conspire with its friends across the Atlantic could no longer be dismissed as left-wing paranoia.

In 1988 Channel Four broadcast a television series based on the novel in which my prime minister was wonderfully brought to life by that great actor, Ray McAnally, and went on to win several BAFTAs and an Emmy. Thereafter interest waned. Following the scandals of the eighties, MI5 was cleaned up (‘we’ve cleared out a lot of deadwood’, a Tory Home Secretary once whispered to me) and ceased messing about in British politics. Under Tony Blair Labour returned resolutely to the centre ground of British politics and was warmly embraced by the Establishment, or most of it.

With the rise of Jeremy Corbyn A Very British Coup is suddenly topical again. At first the prospect of a Corbyn premiership seemed so remote that the idea that he might be the victim of an establishment coup seemed no more than a delicious fantasy. With the recent general election result, however, what was once unimaginable is now a distinct possibility. He could well be prime minister by the turn of the decade. Even so, my instinct remains that, despite a lot of huffing and puffing, the-powers-that-be will let events take their course. But you never know. With Trump in the White House, much of our allegedly free press controlled by demented ideologues and idiots like Richard Dearlove stirring the pot, we can never say never. Enjoy.

Chris Mullin

August 2017

1

The news that Harry Perkins was to become Prime Minister went down very badly in the Athenaeum.

Man’s a Communist, exploded Sir Arthur Furnival, a retired banker.

Might as well all emigrate, said George Fison, who owned a chain of newspapers.

My God, ventured the Bishop of Bath and Wells, raising his eyes heavenward.

As the Press Association tape machine in the lobby began to punch out the first results of the March 1989 general election it became clear that something had gone horribly wrong with the almost unanimous prediction of the pundits that the Tory-Social Democrat Government of National Unity would be re-elected.

Kingston-on-Thames was the first to declare. The sharp young merchant banker who had represented the seat saw his majority evaporate.

A mistake, said Furnival when he had recovered his composure.

Bloody better be, grunted Fison. No one could remember the last time a seat in the Surrey stockbroker belt had returned a Labour Member of Parliament.

The machine was now giving details of a computer forecast to the effect that if the Kingston swing was reproduced across the country Labour would have a majority of around 200 seats.

To hell with computers, muttered Furnival. Fison took a sip of whisky. The Bishop dabbed his forehead with a purple handkerchief.

There were those who had argued that computers had rendered elections obsolete. That very morning a professor from Imperial College had been on the radio describing how he had fed the entire electoral register into a computer which had then selected a perfect cross-section of the population. He had polled the sample and confidently predicted that his results would be accurate to within one quarter of one per cent. Harry Perkins was about to put the learned professor and his computer out of business.

Freak result. Means nothing. The party around the tape machine had been joined by a man in a double-breasted Savile Row suit. Sir Peregrine Craddock’s Who’s Who entry said simply that he was ‘attached to the Ministry of Defence’, but those who know about these things said he was the Director General of DI5.

For the next few minutes Sir Peregrine’s optimism seemed justified. The National Unity candidate held Oxford with a majority only slightly reduced. Braintree stayed Tory. So did Colchester and Finchley. Then at about quarter to midnight came the first results from the North. Salford, Grimsby, York and Leeds East were all held by Labour with doubled, even trebled, majorities. It was at this point that Arthur Furnival disappeared to ring his stockbroker.

At a few minutes to midnight Worcester went Labour, bringing down the first of six Cabinet ministers who would lose their seats that evening. Sir Peregrine took a sip of his orange juice. George Fison rushed back to Fleet Street to dictate an editorial for the late edition of his newspaper. He was last heard shouting that the British people had taken leave of their senses.

By 12.30 it was clear that the National Unity bubble had burst. South of the Wash the Social Democrats were being annihilated. Richmond, Putney, Hemel Hempstead and Cambridge all fell to Labour in quick succession. North of the Wash only the seaside resorts and the hunting country remained in Tory hands.

Like so much else associated with the twentieth century, television sets were banished from the Athenaeum. But in view of the impending national disaster a delegation from the crowd of elderly gentlemen now gathered around the tape machine had been despatched in search of the club secretary, Captain Giles Fairfax. The captain said he would see what he could do and within ten minutes reappeared carrying a small portable set borrowed from the caretaker’s flat. It was now installed beside the tape machine on a table taken from the morning room. All very irregular, said the captain with an apologetic glance at the portrait of Charles Darwin which overlooked the scene. Nevertheless, he stayed to watch.

There was a groan as the television screen immediately focused upon the beaming face of Harry Perkins who was awaiting the declaration of his own result in Sheffield town hall. Perkins, a former steel worker, was a stocky, robust man with a twinkle in his eye and dark, bushy brows. His greying hair was long at the sides and combed over his head to hide his balding crown. His face was deeply lined and rugged, burnished by the great heat of a Sheffield steel mill in the days when Britain had been a steel-producing nation. He was smartly dressed, but nothing flashy. A tweed sports jacket, a silk tie, and on this occasion a red carnation in his buttonhole. Harry Perkins was going to be quite different from any Prime Minister Britain had ever seen. The programme on which he was in the process of being swept to power was quite different from any ever presented to the British electorate.

On the television screen a commentator was now reciting the highlights. Withdrawal from the Common Market. Import controls. Public control of finance, including the pension and insurance funds. Abolition of the House of Lords, the honours list and the public schools.

The manifesto also called for ‘consideration to be given’ to withdrawal from NATO as a first step towards Britain becoming a neutral country. An end to Britain’s ‘so-called nuclear deterrent’ and the withdrawal of all foreign bases from British soil. There was even a paragraph about ‘dismantling the newspaper monopolies’.

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins.

Picture, therefore, the dismay that swept the lobby of the Athenaeum as the television showed Perkins coming to the rostrum in Sheffield town hall to acknowledge not only his own re-election with a record majority, but to claim victory on behalf of his party.

Comrades, intoned brother Perkins.

"Comrades, my foot. Sir Arthur Furnival was apoplectic. Told you the man’s a Communist."

Comrades, repeated Perkins, as though he could hear the heckling coming from the Athenaeum. He then delivered himself of a dignified little speech thanking the returning officer, those who counted the ballot papers, party workers and all the other people it is customary for a victorious candidate to thank. Then he got down to business.

Comrades, it is now clear that by tomorrow morning we shall form the government of this country.

He paused to let the cheering subside. We should not be under any illusion about the task ahead of us. We inherit an industrial desert. We inherit a country which for ten years has been systematically pillaged and looted by every species of pirate, spiv and con man known to civilisation.

Scandalous, muttered Furnival.

Disgraceful carry-on, said the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

All we have won tonight is political power, continued Perkins. By itself that is not enough. Real power in this country resides not in Parliament, but in the boardrooms of the City of London; in the darkest recesses of the Whitehall bureaucracy and in the editorial offices of our national newspapers. To win real power we have first to break the stranglehold exerted by the ruling class on all the important institutions of our country.

Treason, whispered Furnival, that’s what I call it, downright treason.

Perkins paused and then, speaking slowly and looking directly into a television camera, straight into the eyes of Sir Arthur Furnival, he said, Our ruling class have never been up for re-election before, but I hereby serve notice on behalf of the people of Great Britain that their time has come.

Such language had never been heard from a British Prime Minister before. Although received with rapture in Sheffield town hall, Harry Perkins’ words burst upon the Athenaeum as though the end of the world was at hand. Which, in a manner of speaking, it was.

South of France for me, old boy, said Furnival.

Certainly looks like the game’s up, Arthur, murmured the Bishop, whose faith in divine providence had temporarily deserted him.

From nearby Trafalgar Square came a burst of firecrackers as crowds of young people celebrated the election result.

By 1.15 the scale of the disaster was apparent to everyone. The television commentators were now citing a computer prediction that Perkins would have an overall majority of around ninety seats. Gradually the cluster of eminent gentlemen around the television dwindled. Some donned overcoats and slipped miserably out into the night. One ancient member dozed on a Chesterfield in the lobby, his head resting on the marble wall, pince-nez dangling from a cord around his neck.

Not everyone went home. Some drifted upstairs to the huge drawing room and sat in urgent little groups discussing what life in Harry Perkins’ Britain held in store for them.

Early days yet. The speaker was Sir Lucas Lawrence, former permanent secretary at the Department of Industry. He was standing at the end of the drawing room overlooking Carlton House Terrace. On the mantelpiece behind him were white marble busts of Alexander Pope and Edmund Burke. Below in the grate a pinewood fire crackled.

These Labour chappies are all the same, Sir Lucas went on. Always shooting their mouths off in opposition, but once they’ve got their backsides in the limousines they’re as meek as lambs. After retiring from the Department of Industry Sir Lucas had joined the board of an arms company. There had been one or two raised eyebrows at the time. The odd parliamentary question drawing attention to his dealings with the same company in his capacity as a public servant, but it had all blown over and now Sir Lucas was chairman of the board, his civil service pension intact.

Pretty damn serious if you ask me, boomed Lord Kildare, a portly landowner with a castle and 30,000 acres in Scotland and a town house in Chelsea. He was standing facing the huge mirror above the fireplace. His considerable bulk rested on the back of one of the green leather armchairs. The mirror afforded a panoramic view of the vast room behind him. In the distance he could see stewards in red jackets and black bow ties silently commuting between the bar and the little groups of elderly gentlemen scattered around the room. He shook his head sadly. A way of life was coming to an end. Pretty damn serious, repeated Kildare gazing absently into the fire.

Sir Lucas was not convinced. He drew deeply on his Havana and exhaled vigorously. Mark my words, he said firmly, once the boys in the private office get to work, these Labour chappies won’t know what’s hit them.

Kildare side-stepped to avoid being engulfed by an oncoming cloud of cigar smoke. All very well, he said miserably, but I’ve never heard any Prime Minister talk like that fellow Perkins tonight.

Sir Lucas was unruffled. You forget, he said. I’ve seen all this at close quarters. Mind you, I am not saying it was plain sailing. One or two Labour ministers always prove difficult, but in the end we sorted them out.

How? asked Kildare, who already had visions of a life in exile. He pictured himself in a white suit and a straw hat sitting alone on the verandah of the Bermuda Cricket Club, a daiquiri in one hand and an out of date airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph spread on the table before him. No, thought Kildare, give me the grouse moors any day.

Sir Lucas adopted a confidential tone, I’ll tell you how. He lowered his voice and touched Kildare reassuringly on the forearm. We turned the whole damn machine loose on them. More than any man can stand. Whenever my minister insisted on giving money away to co-operatives or any of his other harebrained schemes, I would give old Handley in the Cabinet Office a ring and put him in the picture. He’d get his people to produce a brief opposing ours which would be distributed to all other departments. If necessary he’d follow up with telephone calls to sympathetic ministers and when the matter came up at Cabinet my minister would find himself totally outgunned. After a while he got the message and resigned. Just as well, otherwise we’d have had him reshuffled.

All very well, Lucas, when you’ve only got one or two extremists in the government, but what if you’ve got a whole Cabinet full of them? Kildare ran a finger round the rim of his whisky glass.

Sir Lucas smiled wanly. In that case something bigger’s called for. He glanced over his shoulder as though afraid of eavesdroppers. One or two runs on sterling. A whopping balance of payments crisis. Only takes a few telephone calls to lay this sort of thing on. If you’d seen, as I have, the Prime Minister’s face at 2.30 in the morning when sterling’s going down the drain at a million pounds a minute, you’d soon realise how right I am.

If you ask me, we’ve got a job of work on our hands preserving civilised values. The newcomer to the conversation was Sir Peregrine Craddock, who had been quietly sipping his orange juice on the fringe of the gathering. Speaking as though he was dictating a top secret memorandum, Sir Peregrine continued, Very serious situation. Whole country crawling with extremists. Everything we stand for threatened. Fight back essential.

With that he placed his glass, still half full of orange juice, on the mantelpiece, turned on his heel and strode out of the drawing room. The lobby was empty now except for the member with the pince-nez who was still dozing. It was silent too, apart from the sporadic patter of the tape machine. Sir Peregrine put on his hat and coat, paused to peer at the latest offerings from the Press Association and walked out into the night. It was exactly 2 am on Harry Perkins’ first day as Prime Minister.

Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, lies just north of Oxford Circus and about a mile from the Athenaeum. On general election nights it is the custom for the Director General to give a small drinks party for the governors, their spouses and a handful of senior executives. The party takes place in a sterile suite adjacent to the Director General’s office on the third floor of Broadcasting House, down the corridor from the special radio election unit.

BBC governors are a small body of impartial men and women, whose job is to uphold the commitment to fairness and balance enshrined in the Corporation’s charter. Although BBC governors are supposed to reflect a wide cross-section of society, it is fair to say that the political views of Harry Perkins were not within the spectrum of opinion which they embraced. As the alcohol flowed and the scale of Perkins’ election victory was becoming clear, the wafer-thin veneer of impartiality which normally shrouds BBC pronouncements began to give way to something less dignified.

CAT-AST-ROPHIC. The Belfast brogue of Sir Harry Boyd, who twenty years earlier had been the last Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, broke the gloomy silence around

Reviews for A Very British Coup

[jayeless-698797 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book, although that's not to say it's perfect (the ending in particular was rather anti-climactic). What it does do is pose a topical hypothetical – what if a genuinely progressive politician were to ever become the British prime minister? – and expose in exquisite detail all the forces that would work hard to wreck them.

There are a ton of naïve people out there who believe that an elected government has the authority to do more-or-less whatever they want, and it's a sheer coincidence that all major political parties end up with identical policies on 99.9% of issues (like gleeful participation in American wars, the prioritisation of corporate profits well ahead of wages or pensions…). This book shows well what would happen if a government really tried to cast off all that shit and instead implement common-sense social democratic policies. In venues like the exclusive Athenaeum club and luxurious country estates, the upper-class men who run the secret service, the civil service, the newspapers, the television news bureaux and who represent US diplomatic interests all conspire to ruin the new government before they can have literally any of their privileges taken away.

In Australia, of course, we had a similar thing happen to a leader who was not even nearly as progressive as the central figure of this book: Gough Whitlam was no progressive himself, but he came to power at a moment when the working class was powerful, militant and prepared to punish any Labor leader who did not try to fulfil the aspirations of the membership. During his time as prime minister a number of important reforms passed, but conservatives worked hard to wreck him and ultimately succeeded in the 1975 crisis. An important factor in the success of that effort was that the Americans extracted agreement from “a leading trade union figure” that there would be no industrial action to force Whitlam's reinstatement after removal – and thus, when unionised workers began walking out on impromptu general strikes in 1975, ACTU boss Bob Hawke – who later became the Labor PM who brought neoliberalism to Australia, prompting a mass exodus of the party's membership which leaves the party a hollowed-out husk today – insisted that they all go back to work.

A Very British Coup has its own class traitor union boss – Reg Smith, representing the power workers, who leads a massive industrial action causing rolling blackouts as he insists on a 50% pay rise. Newspapers and TV stations which have never supported an industrial action in their entire histories fall over themselves to support this one, just so they can wedge the government and put them in an impossible position which they hope will lead to their demise.

There are a number of other crises in this book – foreign currency traders working to make the pound crash, conflict with the US as the new government insists on nuclear disarmament and a withdrawal of the US military from its territory, and a scandal over a poorly-built nuclear power plant causing a narrowly-averted disaster.

One thing that is dissatisfying about this book is that it never really feels like Perkins’ government are defeated. Instead, it feels like they grow tired and give up. There is a part where one of the government's best ministers is “forced” to resign because he's been exposed as having a mistress, even though two days earlier it was agreed that he wouldn't have to resign and nothing had really changed since then. Similarly, the scandal that finally finishes the government off doesn't really feel any bigger or more impossible to resolve than previous scandals. It just feels like they've grown tired of fighting, which is not very satisfying narratively.

The novel also doesn't really talk about who's supporting Perkins’ government, aside from a handful of individuals. It doesn't talk about the party membership, or the trade unions that aren't arcing up like Reg Smith's power workers. It doesn't talk about how you could work against the dishonesty of the mainstream newspapers and TV channels – how even in the 80s you could create alternative newspapers for example (except for one character criticising the far-left's alternatives as “high on paranoia, low on facts” or something like it – which is like, at least they've made more than zero effort to put their analysis out there, you know?). Revolutions have succeeded in far more hostile environments, and this book doesn't really explain why this government has opted not to take any inspiration from their strategies.

Then again, another disappointing aspect of this book is that we never really see the government introducing any progressive policies. The early section of the book talks about some of their proposals, but they don't make any headway with any of them, even the ones that would be a lot easier than “force the US military to extricate themselves from our country”. Again, we don't even see them really try.

The book is fairly short, and while in some ways that's a good thing, I do think it would have been enriched by being a bit longer. It would have been nice to see this government achieve some successes, and have the opposition's victory come as a result of a long war of attrition as opposed to the government never successfully doing much and then giving up. Or even if they could have shown us how the timidity of social democracy seals its demise; something to suggest to the reader that progressive change is not just so impossible that there's no point even trying. What can left-wingers do that might actually work?

I feel like this review is more of a messy jumble of thoughts than a review, but long story short I did find this a very interesting book. It also seems like a rare gift to be able to describe currency fluctuations and other economic happenings in such a way that they're actually interesting, so well done there. If the topic sounds interesting to you, I would definitely recommend the read.

[mumoftheanimals · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this as it rang a bell with Jeremy Corbyn. The story goes that a radical British PRime Minister is elected and the Establishment organises a coup. His politics are just like Corbyn's the Leader of the Labour Party elected by members in 2015 although the fictional PM is brighter and nicer. . It is. A light-hearted and sometimes cliched read. The upper classes are unprincipled idiots. The newly elected Party members honest and true, caught up in the machinations of a conspiracy against them. My difficulty is the author lost all credibility when he talked about Oman. Now I know I live in Oman so It is not unreasonable that I know more about the country and him. But The problem was he was so off target that it made me question the bits that I found more convincing. He talks about 'bopping the wops'. There has never been a war there.. There was a bloodless coup Iin 1973. He calls it 'sticking up for democracy' or counter argument 'about oil'. Oman had no oil until 1984 and even then not much, and the government is not democratic. It is a monarchy. But a very benevolent, wise monarch who created a wonderful infrastructure in what is agreed to be the most beautiful country in the Middle East rather than 'fly-ridden'. Now the mistakes are so glaring and the other parts so stereo-typical that he lost his credibility in what was before then quite a convincing look at the consequences of a government the USA did not approve of.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found this a very enjoyable and engaging novel. I was also intrigued to see how prophetic it was in many ways. It was written in 1982, some three years into Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office, and is set in the year or so following a general election in 1989 at which the Labour party secured an unexpected landslide victory. As the novel opens we are given the reactions of various Establishment stalwarts, including press barons, bankers, industrialists and several Civil Service mandarins, all of whom are appalled at the prospect of a genuinely socialist government assuming power. While they seethe with rage and fear we learn something of Perkins’s background.As a young man Harry Perkins had followed his father into employment in a Sheffield steel mill. Once there he became involved in the trade union movement and quickly rose through the local ranks. Spotted as a potential high flier he was awarded a union scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, and continued his rapid progress through the part machinery until he was selected as an MP for his home town. Following a spell as an energetic and diligent back bencher he enters what is clearly the Wilson/Callaghan Government of 1974 to 1979 (though neither of those two leaders is specifically named), eventually rising to Cabinet level with responsibility for maintaining the national grid. In this capacity, despite obstructions posed by officials in his own department, he awards a contract for a nuclear power station to British Industrial Fuels, and they duly build an installation by. When the Conservatives return to power under Mrs Thatcher following ntheir own landslide victory in 1979 Perkins surprises everyone (perhaps including himself) by eventually becoming leader of the Labour Party. An election is called in 1989.Perkins certainly has a radical suite of policies and is eager to commence the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal. He also threatens to dissolve the prevailing newspaper monopolies. As we have already read, the Establishment is appalled, and starts to fight back using its own range of weapons. Sir George Fison owns many of the most popular press titles and uses his papers to mount a concerted effort to undermine the new administration. Meanwhile the military Chiefs of Staff mobilise their own machinery, undertaking almost treasonous activities with Western Allies to circumvent the Government’s planned reductions. The various Whitehall Permanent Secretaries work together to confound the administrative process wherever possible. These mandarins are steely, ruthless characters – very far from the popular perception of Sir Humphrey, but with all of his determination to have their own way.The author, Chris Mullin, would subsequently become a Labour MP and would even serve in Government himself, though at the time that he wrote this novel he was an investigative journalist fighting high profile alleged miscarriages of justice. However, his understanding of the Whitehall machinery is very clear, and he paints a very plausible picture of the relationship between Ministers and senior officials. The novel is always entirely credible, and often very humorous. The novel is also rather alarming as it displays the relative ease with which the combined forces of the banks, the press and senior officialdom can confound the aims of government, regardless of the size of the electoral mandate. One thinks of the persistent rumours, fuelled by memoirs from the likes of Peter Wright, of concerted campaigns by the intelligence community to undermine the Wilson government in the 1970s.

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book shows that, sometimes, only humour will do the job. Were Chris Mullin to have written a serious book about the way in which the establishment rules this country, keeping political parties of whatever hue in check, he would have been dismissed as a bitter politician. Instead, he turns out a comedy that covers some very serious questions about British, and I suspect, most democratic systems.The story of, 'A Very British Coup', is of a left wing Labour government in the 1980's. This was a time when the Labour Party, in reality, was moving to the left and was considered by many to be unelectable. In some senses, this is , therefore, a 'What if....?' story. What would happen were a Labour government to be elected with a mandate to cancel our nuclear weapons programme, eject American forces from their British bases and generally to upset the ruling elite?Harry Perkins, our left wing Prime Minister, is a man with whom one may agree, or dis-agree politically, but he is portrayed as an honest man; acting out of conviction. He is intelligent and caring so, we feel a sympathy which crosses any political divide. The antics of the fourth estate and the strange pairings, such as a Republican American member of the CIA and a British trade unionist seem very plausible, as does the treason, proudly carried out by a member of the aristocracy, who convinces himself that, whilst it would be treason to do the things that he does against a government which he supported, it is his moral duty to pass secret information to a foreign power in this instance. The book is a disguised moral treatise asking us all to examine our moral code and decide where the boundaries are set.I do not think that I am giving too much away by saying that Harry comes to a sticky end and that the real power brokers are left licking the cream from their moustaches. Even though my political sympathies lie more with Reg Smith, the leader of the United Power Workers' Union, the means to an end leave a rather sour taste in the mouth, particularly when one believes, as I do, that these techniques - and probably worse ones, have been used against real politicians for daring to challenge the establishment.This is an easy read which, I believe, should be on the curriculum of every school child in Great Britain: not to incite a flood of far left activists, but to give a little understanding as to how thin is the veneer of democracy under which we live in such a blasé manner